Dustborn: The Kotaku Review

Dustborn is kind of like the people-pleasing friend you know means well but runs ragged trying to accommodate so many people’s needs. Red Thread Games’ adventure/rhythm/beat-em-up hybrid has its strengths, and when it’s functioning as a socially conscious, modern version of a Telltale Games adventure, the lives of its merry band of superpowered misfits are genuinely engrossing. When it tries to be a below-average beat-em-up that trades relationship-building for some of the flimsiest action combat I’ve experienced this side of the Wii era, however, I’m less enthralled.

Dustborn feels as if it’s trying to explore too many things, making the end result come off like a rough draft of every possible idea the team had for the game. It’s filled to the brim with mechanics, characters, and themes that sometimes feel contrived and underbaked, as if they were an idea someone wanted to incorporate whether the game had the bandwidth to incorporate it thoughtfully or not. Its cast of (mostly) superpowered nomads is as diverse in background and culture as you’d expect of a group growing larger as it travels across a dystopian America, but as their tour bus fills up, it becomes clear not every character is going to get the same room to grow as others.

Screenshot: Red Thread Games / Kotaku

It was around midway through Dustborn that I realized not all characters were created equal. Pax, the hero of our story, meets nearly a dozen people who join her and her friends’ cross-country road trip, and at the start, each of these characters has a distinct path you can set them on depending on your choices. For example, Theo, the boss of this group of mutant smugglers making their way across America, can end up viewing Pax and her crew as his equals, his employees, or as surrogate children by the end of Dustborn. The game is constantly reminding you that some of his responses are determined by how you’ve been treating him throughout the game, and will ultimately culminate in a specific ending based on your relationship. It’s an interesting, albeit on-the-nose, way of letting you see how the way you treat someone can affect their worldview.

However, this mechanic is never implemented for cast members who show up in the second half of the game. Instead, those less malleable characters end up feeling like narrative devices designed to get Pax and friends out of a sticky situation or manufacture drama that never actually materializes, and they ultimately feel like little more than an idea that wasn’t cooked long enough. This problem extends beyond the game’s character writing and bleeds into a story that cannot seem to pick a lane.

Dustborn starts out straightforward enough. Pax, her friend Sai, and her ex Noam are all working with a man named Theo as an undercover punk band smuggling a data key across an alt-future version of America. In this world, President John F. Kennedy wasn’t the one killed in his 1963 assassination attempt. Instead, it was his wife Jackie Kennedy who lost her life, and in reaction to this loss, the president founded Justice, a policing force that descended into fascism, especially when targeting “Anomals,” superpowered individuals who can affect different elements with their voice. For example, Pax can create negative feelings with her vocals whereas Noam can calm a heightened situation. The group has to make it across the country undetected in order to finish the job and reach a better life.

Screenshot: Red Thread Games / Kotaku

That in and of itself is a strong enough foundation for this road trip, but every time Pax’s tour bus stopped, I knew I was going to meet another character, find out about some other layer to the country-wide conspiracy our heroes are contending with, or learn something new about this crew. By the time I was halfway across America, Dustborn already felt like it was caving under the weight of its ambition. It’s clear the team wanted to touch on different cultures, conflicts, themes, relationships, and character archetypes, but every time it expanded its focus I could feel it losing sight of the strong baseline it had already established. Eventually, the grounded stories started to feel like they were getting lost in the noise.

There are parts of Dustborn I don’t think I could even coherently describe to you because they came and went so fast I don’t think I quite got what the game was going for. Entire sections feel like detours to a different story that wasn’t finished, with constant escalations and deescalations of stakes and giant lore drops that feel disconnected from moment to moment. Dustborn is at its best when it’s examining how a group of persecuted people navigate the cynical endgame of a fascist America and still try to find hope and connection. So often, those ideas are derailed by ineloquent genre-blending that never pays off. Entire characters are swallowed whole in the final moments as they get fed into the gaping maw of convoluted turns Dustborn takes, and I’m left wondering why the game had to balloon into this cluttered katamari of disparate elements when it was already doing enough.

Screenshot: Red Thread Games / Kotaku

I wrestle with the big picture because I really, really enjoyed the smaller moments in Dustborn. Before it started adding characters for characters’ sake, it had me wrapped around its finger as I watched sisters reconnect, downtrodden people find hope within each other, and a group of oppressed people fight for their freedom in an unjust world. Those were the moments that kept me going when a new contrivance or convoluted twist derailed what I was here to see. But ultimately, those were the least intrusive parts of Dustborn, as the combat remains the most egregious things the game adds on top of its already too-full plate. It’s annoyingly imprecise, its bells and whistles from Pax’s arsenal of vocal attacks don’t add enough interesting flair to give the game its own identity, and the only real redeeming part of it is that it gives you the option right out the gate to do it less.

The game’s rhythm sequences, in which you play as the titular Dustborn punk band, fare a bit better and are challenging enough, but I never looked forward to them because I frankly found the music lacking. Maybe that was intentional, considering Dustborn is just a cover for a smuggling operation, but I’m not booting any of these songs up on Spotify. Dustborn constantly bites off more than it can chew, even for quick gags like an entire turn-based battle sequence that pays homage to RPG classics. It’s not even that these ideas are inherently unsound, it’s that the execution never matches the highs of its relationship writing.

Screenshot: Red Thread Games / Kotaku

I feel like I’ve spent the majority of this review dogpiling on a game I mostly enjoyed. Maybe that’s because I’m frustrated by the squandered potential smothered under a pile of excess, like someone unwilling to say “when” to the person holding the Olive Garden cheese grater. Part of me feels like I need a game like Dustborn right now; one that believes that people joining together can change the world and that despite how fucked everything is around them, there is still something to fight for. I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started backsliding into the same cynicism I felt as a teenager. I’ve watched the world get worse around me as those who held me up have been beaten down just as hard. How long must we stand together and fight against systems that would rather we lay down and die before things change? How much fight do I have left in me to find out? Large parts of Dustborn poked at my anxiety about the state of the world, and despite its unabashed belief that Pax and her friends could make the world a better place, I feel myself becoming more jaded at the notion. Perhaps the world, much like Dustborn, isn’t as easily definable as good or bad, just full of good people trying to make the most of the situation they’re in. I want to believe as much as the game does, and maybe that belief is enough for me to look past its overambition.

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